Against Permaculture

The notion that a modified hunter/gatherer system could be the cure-all to the energy, environmental and organizational dilemmas of post-industrial man is surely one of the maddest ideas ever propagated in the often batty world of alternative farming. Such is “permaculture”, a design concept and related philosophy (and offshoots) concocted by David Holmgren and Bill Mollison in the sleepy backwater of Tasmania under the shadow of the world oil crisis in the late 1970s. The term itself is an elision of the words ‘permanent’ and ‘agriculture’. It has unfortunately become somewhat interchangeable with words like ‘organic’ where this word refers to natural farming methods and the general movement for natural food production free of artificial fertilizers and pesticides. Once there were ‘organic’ gardens. Now they’re ‘permaculture’ gardens. Permaculture, though, is a very specific thing, an assembly of very specific theories and practices, and is therefore quite distinct from other broader manifestations of alternative farming.

In practice it refers to an approach to sustainable agriculture based on perennial as opposed to annual plants. In theory it proposes that the low-energy systems of hunter/gatherers provide the best model for a future agriculture and, by extension, urban and other design challenges. It has developed a large following worldwide; thousands of people have been trained through certified permaculture design courses, and it is eagerly embraced by the wide-eyed and ecologically-minded. There is, however, a worrying absence of critique regarding permaculture, both among its devotees and among outsiders. You can search in vain for material that offers a sober, critical account of the permaculture ‘design concept’. There tends to be a considerable amount of ‘cult’ in permaculture. Permaculturalists, like other greenies, are notoriously zealous; they are on a mission to save the world and have rarely asked hard questions about the assumptions and suppositions that underpin their system.

The present writer, it should be known, is himself a life-long enthusiast and dirt-under-the-nails practitioner of old-fashioned organic farming and gardening – and is not entirely immune to batty ideas - but he has never been either an advocate nor a practitioner of permaculture. In fact, truth be told, permaculture is one of his pet hates. Nowadays it is almost impossible to mingle among the natural farming crowd without constantly having to deal with permaculture and its pervasive ideology. It infects natural farming like canker in an apple orchard. The author’s objections are both philosophical and practical, and longstanding. As it happens, he shares these objections with his son, who is a professional organic horticulturalist and who is well-versed in the shortcomings of permaculture since he encounters them in the field every day. Together, father and son bemoan the prevalence of permaculture on a regular basis. Does no one see its failings? A few of them are as follows:

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Permaculture is a neo-primitivist, regressive and anti-civilizational philosophy. It is a by-product of late 70s Marxist anthropology-driven utopianism whereby Marx meets Rousseau. Marx supposed that there was an inevitable transition, or cycle, of ‘modes of production’ from primitive communism, through feudalism, industrialism and then to a post-capitalist utopia, advanced communism or primitive communism revisited. Permaculture shares this implicit cyclic structure. It is a return to the lost ideal of the hunter/gatherer. The permaculturalist idealizes the hunter/gatherer mode of production and wants to create a post-industrial post-capitalist version of it. At the same time he sneers upon the accomplishments of the great grain-based civilizations, which is to say civilization in general. This Rousseauian bias is rife among environmentalists; permaculture codifies it into a design system.

As an ideology born out of the 1970s oil crisis permaculture assumes that energy is expensive and scarce and will become more so in future. Like the Mad Max movies from the same era, it is founded upon the myth of scarcity. In reality, though, this world of scarcity has not eventuated. The peak oil apocalypse – a favorite David Holmgren theme – has not happened, and nor is it likely to happen. Permaculture has the same psychology as Marxism; it justifies itself by theorising an inevitable crisis. But the fact is that energy is abundant. Forty years after the publication of Permaculture One oil has never been so cheap, and in the long term the transition to diverse non-oil energy sources is likely to be relatively painless and without intervening crises. As a general point, it is not likely that the captains of industry have made a massive miscalculation – it is more likely that David Holmgren and Bill Mollison have. This makes the whole raison d’etre of permaculture moot. It is premised upon a crisis scenario that did not and is not likely to happen.

Permaculture frowns upon high-energy activities such as digging, ploughing, grain-growing and so on, and opts for low-intensity perennial crops. This allows for certain energy savings, but in every other respect it is massively inefficient. Every efficiency gained by mechanization, division of labour or the human imitation of natural processes is stripped from the system. The plain fact is that permaculture projects are often fatally space inefficient. Like the hunter/gatherer systems upon which permaculture is modelled, it requires a large amount of space to sustain a small number of people. It is often said that organic farming is less productive than chemical-based industrial farming. This is generally true, although usually only to a tolerably small degree. In the case of permaculture, there is often a massive decline in productivity. The idea that an advanced hunter/gatherer system based on perennial crops can feed the world’s population is an utter nonsense. 

This is not to say that all permaculture ideas are misconceived. Like other alternative farming systems it promotes botantical diversity. Monocultures are precarious and can be disasterous, but diversity is over-rated. Often permaculturalists fetishize about “diversity”. Can you have too much diversity? Of course you can – in agriculture as in human society. (To employ a vulgar analogy: Diarrhea is not a cure for constipation.) Diversity is not an inherent good. It is merely one desirable characteristic in a robust, healthy system.  But an overabundance of diversity means a lack of specialization and resulting inefficiencies, as already noted. A permaculture farm will have a hundred different food crops but specialize in none. It is stripped of all economies of scale. 

And who wants a diet based on nibbling perennials anyway? Perennial crops suck. Permaculture yields a diet that is undesirable and unhealthy. Primarily it means a heavy emphasis upon fruit crops. Most of the perennial crops available in temperate zones are fruit-bearing. Permaculture is for fruitarians. Permaculturalists end up eating an awful lot of plums. Their diet is critically low in complex carbohydrates, legumes and their fermented food products, all of which have been the foundation of civilization. It is as mad as the paleo-diet, another hunter/gatherer throwback.

Moreover, permaculture has an entirely perverse view of human labour. It measures labour simply by its energy value. That is, it confuses labour with energy and promotes a crudely utilitarian view of human endeavour. The problem here is that the culture of food by the human hand is much more than merely an expending of energy. It is an expression of our humanness. This is like measuring human activity by its horsepower. It is reductionistic and misses the point. It sees no dignity in human labour at all. Furthermore, throughout permaculture theory there is a contradiction regarding the availability of labour. In an energy crisis labour becomes more available to agriculture, not less, because urbanization starts to reverse – there is a flight to the land. If the projected energy crisis of the permaculture distopia did eventuate, the labour-saving solutions of permaculture would be redundant. Similarly, exporting permaculture to underdeveloped countries is stupid because such countries have an oversupply of able-bodied young men standing around doing nothing. They don't need to save on labour by growing breadfruit instead of wheat. 

In general, the measuring of the relationships between different elements of the farm/garden/system in pure energy terms is distorted and often leads to undesirable results in every dimension. This type of energy-obsessed utilitarianism is crude and backward. You probably can heat your bedroom with your own excrement, but should you?

With a thuggish and sometimes subversive insistence upon utility, permaculturalists have often been responsible for the spread of noxious weeds in many parts of the world. Similarly, a mistaken creed of 'diversity' and an aversion to human intervention has often led to widespread land degradation. 

The proposal to change the plants which we grow from annuals to perennials is a terrible rejection of human culture which comes from a view of people as beasts (i.e their labour is just horsepower/energy). When in fact the cultivated crops (often annuals) are the embodiment of a accumulation of human culture throughout millenia. The selecting of beautiful pumpkins, wheat, rice, etc. from their wild ancestor plants and the human activity of perfecting and developing nature in this manner is the height of what it is to be human and is one of the most important things that differentiates us from the beasts. Our annual cultivated crops are part of humanity - they developed with us, and we developed with them. We have developed to be fed with these crops and cannot do without them, just as they have developed to be cultivated by us and cannot exist without us. This symbiosis completely escapes the permaculturalist. The permacultural world-view is not just anti-civilizational but anti-humanistic and alienated in this respect.

Whilst permaculture often appeals to people who are rejecting the modern, anti traditional relations between man and nature it is in fact an extension of that counter- traditional trend. Reducing relations between man and nature, man and man, and natural system to natural system to nothing but an energy relationship is the height of materialism and a further extension of modernity's materialist mentality.

Sociologically, permaculture thrives among middle-class, disillusioned, ill-educated back-to-nature ferals – all the children of Rousseau’s noble savage. For them, it is not enough to reject the excesses of industrial brutalism as do other natural farming exponents (say, the Prince Charles model of natural farming, or the Catholic distributists.) Instead, they reject civilization per se, at a fundamental level, and glorify the itinerant tribalism of pre-civilization hunter/gatherers. The permaculturalist is typically a scavenger on the fringes. The advent of permaculture should be seen as part of a particular sociology in Australian society during the late 1970s onwards in which the hippy and punk sub-cultures blended into the radical ecological neo-tribalism of the “feral”. These hunter/gatherer “ferals” stand in contrast to the often conservative, earthy, no-nonsense men-of-the-soil types of the broader natural farming movement. This is how civilizations fray.

Old roses in the garden of the author. As well as the points noted here, permaculture is a strictly utilitarian system that overlooks matters of beauty. If you can't eat it, it has no value.  

Finally, in practice, to a great extent permaculture tends to operate like a pyramid scheme. There are endless permaculture design courses that do little else than train more people to run permaculture design courses who then run more permaculture design courses, and so on. There are few successful (which is to say profitable) permaculture farms, especially if one takes out of the equation the money made from offering yet more permaculture design courses. A farm that needs to offer expensive training courses or tours in order to make a profit is not a successful farm. Similarly, a permaculture community garden that needs public funding is not really a successful enterprise. The simple fact is that while there are many successful, robust, sustainable, profitable organic farms – the 'biodynamic' farmers in Australia have over a million hectares under profitable cultivation and a booming export industry -, there are very few really successful permaculture projects and never have been ever since the inception of the system in the 1970s. The ‘design concept’ appealed to a particular demographic of green consciousness in the era of energy anxiety but has produced very little other than a small army of labour-avoiding hobby farmers with a Certificate 3 in permaculture design.

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black

Kolam: Patterns at the Portals

The designs shown on this page are all from a single street in Mattancherry.

The tradition of “kolam” – also called “rangoli” and other names in other parts of Hindoostan ("kolam" being the Tamil word) – is thought to be very ancient. Being an ephemeral art it is very hard to tell. It consists of inscribing geometrical or interlaced patterns on the floor or ground, especially at the entrance to buildings. In an earlier post on these pages (see here) the present writer revealed his fascination for the symbolism of portals and doorways. Kolam is a traditional folk art that is associated with that symbolism. He collects photographs of portals, but he also keeps a collection of kolam designs as he encounters them during his travels. 

In the north of India, in Rajistan and elsewhere, the inscribed patterns are often coloured and resemble what are usually called mandalas. Often they are found on walls or the sides of buildings. In the south, though, the more ancient and rustic practices are preserved and the patterns are found at doorways or on the steps at the front of houses. It is a domestic religious art. Certain patterns are preserved and passed down through families, usually among women. The custom in the south is for women to sweep the doorstep of the house every morning and to inscribe the kolam on the ground using rice powder, a flour paste or, these days, chalk. 

The present author saw a great many such patterns in Bangalore during a visit there several years ago. On his recent journey he has only seen kolam in certain areas of Cochin, specifically some streets in the town of Nazareth and parts of Mattancherry. In particular, one street, resident to a community of Brahmin families, had a large collection of patterns drawn at the front of every house. The pictures illustrating this page are from that street in Mattancherry. 

A very handsome Brahmin gentleman invited the author to photograph them and was happy to discuss them, but he explained that it was largely a matter for womenfolk and he could not provide much information about the actual significances of particular patterns. Some are simple. Some are complex. Some are floriform. Some are astral and star-like. Some are explicitly geometric. Often women pride themselves on being able to inscribe the pattern in a single unbroken movement without lifting the chalk from the ground. “They invite in the god,” the Brahmin explained. This idea is the usual explanation – the patterns are an invitation to the gods, or to good spirits, or to “luck”. Inscribing the pattern at the entryway to the house every morning is regarded as auspicious. 

It should be noted, though, that the patterns are often labyrinthine, and are in this sense connected to portals and doorways. It is sometimes explained that the patterns are designed to bamboozle evil spirits that might try to enter an abode – that, quite the opposite to an “invitation to the god”, they are a barrier to the devil. 

This author is of the opinion that, most probably, the original idea behind such patterns is – like so much other traditional symbolism – astronomical in nature, and that the patterns represent the motions of heavenly bodies and planets as seen from a geocentric viewpoint. They are thus an extension of the astronomical symbolism of portals. The symbolism of the patterns is thus primordial, although its original significance has been forgotten. This is characteristic of Indian religion in general: it persists since very early times and is a remembrance of primordial forms, although the original ideas have been forgotten. Kolam are probably among the clearest examples of this - ancient, primordial patterns preserved as a mere "folk  art" in a simple domestic context. This most humble of art forms might, in fact, be the most pure and profound. The author hopes to explain more of this and expand upon it in later posts.

Yours

Harper McAlpine Black

The Hebraic Tongue Restored

About a third of words in Biblical Hebrew, so it’s said, are technically incomprehensible. They either only occur once or else are used in various senses with unique meanings multiple times, or are otherwise obscure in sundry ways. Biblical Hebrew is a compressed language. It has a relatively small vocabulary that is pressed into highly complex and subtle uses. This is all compounded by the fact that it lacks vowels – as a written language it is a language of consonants with pronunciations and distinctions between root words coming later by convention. It is inherently arcane.

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It is unknown when Jews first arrived on the Malabar Coast. A notice in the Paradiso synagogue in Jew Town, Cochin, says that it was in the aftermath of the destruction of the Second Temple, 72AD. Other traditions say that there were already Jewish traders there at that time. 

The present author was pondering these facts recently while sitting in the Paradiso Synagogue in Jew Town, Mattancherry, the only surviving functional synagogue in Cochin on the Malabar Coast. Once there was a large Jewish community supporting seven or so synagogues in this region. Most of the community has now migrated to Israel. The Paradiso Synagogue, dating back to the early 1600s, remains and is open to the public at selected times every day except the Sabbath. This writer had just had a pleasant conversation with Mrs. Sarah Cohen, aged 93, an embroiderer with a shop directly up from the Synagogue. She related that there is now barely a quorum and that, in all likelihood, when her generation is gone the synagogue will cease to conduct services. Like other Synagogues in the region it will then be classified merely as “heritage” and in the care of organizations based in Israel. It will be a pity, but probably unavoidable. Jew Town is now largely a tourist affair anyway. It is well-preserved and still retains its historic character, and it is frequented by Israeli tourists, but it is not really a Jew Town anymore.

In any case, the present writer was admiring the Synagogue, observing the strict silence and pious atmosphere of the place  as tourists came and went, when he realized that he had little trouble reading some of the Hebrew on the notices on the walls. He could read them quite naturally. This came as something of a surprise because, in truth, it must be over twenty years since he applied himself to any serious study of Biblical Hebrew. He once received some intensive study in the language from an Irish Catholic priest and thereafter dabbled in it – qabbalistically - on and off for several years without ever gaining anything like a decent proficiency. It is surprising how much of it has stuck. Even through years of teaching Biblical Studies – at an undergraduate introductory level – he had little call to use Hebrew to any great degree, other than a few words here and there. Yet, when confronted with a slab of Hebrew text, he can read the letters and recognizes much of the vocabulary, even if the grammar is gone. His every attempt to learn other exotic languages has born little fruit over the years yet, for some reason, he has managed to retain a good amount of Biblical Hebrew. 

In part, this must be because he once owned a copy of and immersed himself in the wonderfully seminal work of the French poet Febre d’Olivet, The Hebraic Tongue Restored. It was once among his very favourite books. He bought a copy in a facsimile edition in the days when he was working in the second-hand book trade. Where this copy is now is a mystery. Like other once favourite books it is long gone. But he remembers it with great fondness. It is one of those priceless tomes, a formative work, strange, eccentric, charming, arcane, instructive, suggestive, impressive. Published by Monsieur d’Olivet in 1767, it is a work that proposes that the Hebrew tongue has great mystic powers and occult significances. It elevates the language of the Bible to a special status. D’ Olivet was writing in the era prior to the Rosetta Stone and the deciphering of the Egyptian hieroglyphs. Among the central claims of his book is the claim that Hebrew contains the lost secrets of the priests of ancient Egypt. As such, it had a profound impact upon the French occult revival and its other European offshoots in the nineteenth century. It championed the notion that the “Hebraic Tongue” is an esoteric language of extraordinary cosmic, occult and metaphysical power. The book purports to investigate the very roots of the language. 

One of the luminaries who joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in London at the end of the nineteenth century once complained that he was promised to be shown the secrets of the universe, and upon this promise swore an oath to the death at his initiation, only to be given a copy of the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Such an inflated, cosmic, account of Hebrew in European occult circles goes directly back to The Hebraic Tongue Restored. 

Of course, Monsieur d’Olivet was wrong about the Egyptian hieroglyphs, but aside from that his study of Hebrew and exposition of the roots of the Hebrew language was groundbreaking, insightful and competent. It remains an etymological and linguistic goldmine. And who is to say that his depiction of Biblical Hebrew as a language of extraordinary esoteric depth is mistaken? Its compression and compact vocabulary certainly render it mysterious and potent, and for Jews, as for Christians – and Mahometans too – it is, after all, a tongue in which God Himself chose to speak. By this perspective, every letter necessarily has infinite depth. It is a sacred tongue. It is not the tongue of the ancient Egyptians, but sacred nevertheless. It is a language compressed under the weight of the Divine Word. 

The highlights of the Hebraic Tongue Restored are the lexicon of Hebrew roots, and then – based on that – d’Olivet’s remarkable translation and exposition of the first section of the Book of Genesis, the cosmology of Moses. This is a tour de force in the application of the root ideas exposed in the lexicon and truly one of the most profound expositions of Genesis ever undertaken by either Jew or Gentile. In his younger years the present writer spent night after night delving into the mysteries revealed by Monsieur d’Olivet, and it is probably because these mysteries were so arresting and so compelling – so metaphysically fundamental – that they made a lasting impression upon him. Hebrew speaks to the heart. It is like no other language. The Koran boasts that its Arabic is easy to remember, but for the present writer the claim is even truer of the Bible's Hebrew. Terse, concentrated, potent with meaning, it seems a language just made to carry significances that extend beyond time and space. No study of the language makes this clearer than d'Olivet's Hebraic Tongue Restored. 

In the normal course of events, the present author is an avowed enthusiast and apologist for the inspired status of the Septuagint; in matters Biblical he is most at home with the Greek. But his recent visit to the old Synagogue in Jew Town in Cochin took him back to earlier interests and younger days when he engaged with and was fascinated by the cryptic powers of the Hebrew. The Hebraic Tongue Restored is still available in facsimile edition, and these days in PDF form. Anyone with any interest in Biblical Hebrew – and especially its deeper, qabbalistic dimensions – should acquire a copy. 

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black

Sam Gerrans, Quranites & Petra

Those many people who, not unreasonably, suspect that something is profoundly amiss in contemporary Mahometanism often mistakenly turn to the Koran and try to identify odious passages that supposedly give license to suicide bombers, clitorectomies, beheadings and such other Islam-related atrocities that today populate our news feeds with appalling regularity. They will hold up the Koran, point to nefarious texts, and declare that “the problem starts here!” But in fact, as anyone with more than an outside and partisan view of the religion knows from bitter experience, the problem is not the Koran but rather the secondary sources of Islamic piety, the Hadith. These are the so-called ‘Traditions’ of the Prophet, and the thing that characterizes modern Islam – certainly since the rise of the Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia – is an uncritical adherence to a selected collation of such Traditions to the extent that the Koran is read through that lens. This fact is on full display in the approved Saudi translation of the Koran known as the Hillel edition. Every passage and verse of the Holy Book is explained by reference to one or other of the voluminous Hadith. The Wahhabis are, first and foremost, Hadithists. They elevate the supposed Traditions of Mahomet to the status of pseudo-Scripture and impose them upon the text and meaning of the Holy Writ. The justifications for suicide bombings, female genital mutilation, and so on, are not to be found in the Koran but rather in the Hadith, or else in the Koran as interpreted via the Hadith. The manifestly unhealthy state of contemporary Mahometanism has its roots there, and nowhere else. Accordingly, efforts to correct this state of affairs, and somehow to rouse the Saracens to sensible reform – some practical accommodation with the facts of modernity – must begin there and nowhere else as well.

This, in a fashion, is the agenda of Sam Gerrans. He has rightly gauged that the religion known as ‘Islam’ is primarily a construction of Traditions (Hadith) and is not a simple reflection of the Koran at all. He thus regards it as a “man-made” construction that has been imposed upon – and violates – the actual teachings of the Holy Koran. He is an enthusiast of the actual teachings of the Holy Koran, but not at all fond of the religion known as ‘Islam’. He devotes himself to separating these two things and to promoting a non-Islamic, non-Mahometan, reading of the Arabic Scripture. It is a unique point of view. He calls himself a ‘Quranite’. He has no doubt that the Koran is a divine revelation, but he insists that it has nothing to do with the man-made religion of those he calls Traditionalists, which is to say Hadithists. He dismisses the Hadith literature of the Muslims as hearsay and affords it no authority at all. He offers a reading of the Koran with the lens of the Hadith, and the whole edifice of the Mahometan faith, removed. To this end he has learnt Arabic, acquired a vast understanding of Koranic grammar, and has produced a copiously annotated Islam-free Koran available for free at his website Quranite.com. 

There are other Koran-only Muslims who have rejected the intruding authority of the Hadith literature, but Mr. Gerrans goes further. He does not count himself a “Muslim” at all. He is only a follower and devotee of the Koran - hence "Quranite". He insists that this has no relation to the historic Islamic religion. Unlike Koran-only Muslims, he has no interest in reforming or correcting Islam or in redefining or sanitizing the designation “Muslim”. He has severed the links entirely. He has cut the Gordian knot. He is a “Quranite” pure and simple. He is immersed in and marvels at the revelatory wonders of the Koran but comprehensively rejects anything and everything to do with the “man-made” religion called ‘Islam’.

It is a radical stance. And challenging, and also, as he does it, refreshing. If nothing else, Mr. Gerrens is a determinedly independent thinker. He has, at some point in his life, encountered the Holy Koran – or it has encountered him – and he has relentlessly pursued his own intuitions regarding that sacred text, and – most impressively – he has done so while holding the pervasive mind-set of the Mahometans at bay at every turn. How many others have been able to grapple with the Koran and keep it rigorously separate from the vast structures of institutional Islam? It is surely a feat of great intellectual discipline. One would imagine that if someone is so moved by the Koran that they become convinced it is a divine revelation this would naturally lead them towards some embrace of the Mahometan creed. Many converts to Islam attest that they came to the faith via the Holy Book. But not Mr. Gerrans. Instead, he was struck by how at odds the Mahometan religion is to the plain teachings of the Book. He was moved by the manifest inconsistencies between the practices of the Muslims and the teachings of the Book they purport to cherish. He was able to keep himself intellectually aloof from Islam and its traditions and to just become a devoted student of the Book. It is a noble independence. His work has the integrity of someone who has been able to think outside all the habits of Islamic civilization, and he does so while maintaining cogency and lucidity. Reading Mr. Gerrens’ work offers a new, fresh view of the Koran, throwing new light on a text that even the most occidental orientalist has habitually viewed through Mahometan eyes.

As an example, let us ask: what does the Koran say concerning non-believers and the propagation of the Koranic message? The institutions of jihad, Mr. Gerrens insists, are Hadith-based and not in the least Koranic. Rather, all the Koran proposes is this: that believers share the ‘Warning of the Last Days’ of the Koran with non-believers, urge them to embrace the One God, but then to leave judgment, reward and retribution to God, while authorizing self-defense if believers are subsequently attacked. This is all that a plain reading of the text allows, and nothing more. Other Mahometan institutions, Mr. Gerrens argues, have no Koranic warrant whatsoever. Are dogs unclean? This is entirely a concoction of the Hadith, he says, and has no basis in the Koran. The laws of Halal slaughter? Traditions, but not Koranic. An obsessive prohibition on alcohol? Not Koranic. Gerrens seeks to liberate the Holy Text from the distortions of the Hadith systematically and comprehensively. In an appendix to his translation of the Holy Writ he compares ‘Islam’ with the actual teachings of the Koran. The religion called ‘Islam’, he concludes, is not Koranic – it is essentially Hadithism. If one views the Koran without the distorting lens of the Hadith we arrive at something very different to any traditional form of the Mahometan faith.

This work of Mr. Gerrens deserves a much wider audience, both among Mahometans and others. It has impressive breadth for the work of a self-taught scholar. He engages with the Arabic text at depth and elucidates the finer meanings of the text with painstaking detail. It is the labour of decades, full of insight and intelligence. If nothing else, he offers a great resource to students of the Koran – the Koran seen through rigorously non-Islamic eyes. If one is looking for a fresh view of the Koranic Scripture, this is an excellent place to start. Let us suppose the Koran was not delivered into the cradle of nascent Islam as the traditional narratives would have it. What would it be like then? The‘Quranite’ exercise of Mr. Gerrens is like a view into parallel universe where the Koran exists and yet Islam does not. Given the state of contemporary Islam one can hardly be blamed for finding this position tempting. What if we throw out Islam but keep the Koran? It is a liberating thought.

It is to Mr. Gerran’s credit that his review of the Koran is not motivated by some shallow modernist agenda. There has been a welter of tawdry Korans of late – the feminist Koran, the ecologist Koran, the gay-gender-diversity-transexual Koran, and so on – that try to enlist VIth century Allah to XXIst century social causes. These are uniformly useless where they are not also ludicrous and cringeworthy. The Quranite endeavour is not in that category, thankfully. Mr. Gerran is not out to show how God is a leftist liberal. He seems intent on following his own methodology and on accepting the results whether they agree with modern sensitivities or not. His translation and commentary has the consistency and integrity that so many others lack.

As it happens, however, the present writer feels that the Gerrens strategy goes a little too far. The Hadith literature is, after all, a vast treasure-house in itself – an extensive folklore, deep and profound, a storehouse of traditional wisdom assembled over many centuries and bringing together diverse strands of oral culture. But it should never be allowed to overshadow the Koran. Would it not be possible to put the test of Koranic compatibility to the Hadith literature and to put the Koran first and the Hadith second-most where it belongs? Need we throw out the baby with the bathwater? The real problem, indeed, is not even the Hadith as Mr. Gerrens and other Koran-only advocates propose, but rather the way in which the Hadith literature is used to construct the Shariah and other Mahometan institutions. It need not be used in that way. The problem lies in elevating the Hadith to the status of pseudo-Scripture instead of recognizing it as an oral tradition of beautiful textures, colours and moods but of strictly limited authority. This writer, at least, celebrates the Hadith literature - acknowledging its many blemishes and obvious forgeries - but he understands that one ought never read the Koran through its lens. The relation between that literature and the Holy Book needs clarification. That is a task of outstanding urgency today. 

One aspect of Mr. Gerrens brave adventure into Koranic independence stands out for special comment. He is so keen to divorce the Koran from Mahometanism that he has embraced, somewhat recklessly, the daring archaeological thesis of Mr. Dan Gibson as advanced in the book Quranic Geography. Mr. Gibson has proposed the extraordinary notion that Mahomet and the early Muslims did not live in Mecca but rather in the Nabatean city of Petra. It is proposed that during civil wars in the first century of the Era of the Hijra the Arabs of the Hijaz region transplanted the geography of Mahometan piety from there to Mecca and thereafter Mecca became the place of Islamic pilgrimage and the holy city of the Musselmans. This is, needless to say, a very radical thesis indeed, and accordingly requires a wealth of compelling evidence to support it if it is to be entertained. Incautiously, Mr. Gerrens has embraced this Petra thesis as a whole and one finds reference to it throughout the footnotes and commentary of his Quranite Koran. Incautiously, because on the face of it the thesis of Mr. Gibson is a long stretch and by no account can it be considered even part way demonstrated. This is not to say it is necessarily wrong, but it is far from being proven. 

Gibson offers some enticing arguments for supposing that the Koran was first composed in Petra, not Mecca, but they are not altogether convincing. There is a tendency in secular scholarship nowadays to suggest – or at least to suspect – that perhaps the origins of the Koran did indeed lie westwards of Mecca in Syria and Nabatea. There is a body of (minority) scholarly thought that supposes that the roots of Koranic Arabic are Syrio/Aramaic. The Arabic of the Koran is strange and at odds with that typical of Mecca. And moreover, as many readers of the Koran have long noted, the geographical notices in the Koran do not seem to match Mecca and surrounds. Secular scholars are happy to consider the possibility that the Koran – or the core of the text – was originally composed somewhere other than around Mecca, most likely in the cradle of ancient Judeo-Christian Syria. Petra was once a sacred city of those Arabs. Mr. Gibson joins the dots and, citing various elements of the archaeology of Petra, argues that Petra is a better locus for the origins of the Koran than is Mecca. Mr. Gerrens, eager to distance the Koran from institutional and historic Islam has attached his non-Islamic reading of the Koran to Mr. Gibson’s proposal.

But to do so is surely premature and it adds an unecessary dimension of conjecture and archaelogical speculation to an otherwise rigorous translation of the Koran. It would have been enough for Mr. Gerrens to note that the geography of the Koran is ill-fitting with the known geography of Mecca and to leave it as an open question. Instead, he has settled on the Petra thesis and argues the case for Mr. Gibson from the signals in the Koranic text. This has the effect of removing the text from its familiar Mecca/Medina setting, and Mr. Gerrens obviously enjoys the way in which this loosens and liberates meanings and messages from the accepted and traditional contexts, but it also has the effect of making his translation seem crankish and eccentric in places. He has hitched a very fine labour of translation to a very dubious, or at least questionable, archaeology.  His work is far more solid than that of Mr. Gibson. 

It remains to be seen if the Quranite translation and Mr. Gerren's work attracts a following or whether it just floats around in cyberspace as yet another one-man adventure in speculative Islam. There are many aspects of his work that are unsatisfying. He rejects the classical distinction between early and late surahs (chapters) in the text, for instance, and some of his renderings of familiar vocabulary seems idiosyncratic. It is, after all, Sam Gerren's lifelong encounter with the Holy Koran that is offered to readers, his personal encounter, and so it carries his fingerprints and is blemished with his personal peculiarities. It is not objective and selfless. But it is courageous and bold, and courage and boldness are certainly qualities that the Koranic world - Islamic and otherwise - need in abundance in these very sorry times. Conventional Islam is in a terrible mess. Some bold thinking outside the strictures of traditional or rather Wahhabist Islam is long overdue. 

Yours

Harper McAlpine Black

The Stories of Ruskin Bond

It is merely a surmise on the part of the present writer but he supposes that his favorite Anglo-Indian writer Ruskin Bond was so named, Ruskin, after the great John Ruskin, another favorite of the present writer. It is an unconfirmed surmise, but really, why else would an English couple name their son Ruskin in 1934? In any case, true or not, it remains a comforting thought, and it always enhances the experience of reading the many tales of the voluminous Mr. Bond. Indeed, he has – they say – written no fewer than five hundred or so short stories, along with poems and travel writings, and so it is entirely proper to speak of his “many tales”. The present writer has delved into some of them during his travels around the wide lands of Hindoostan. The sole purpose of this current post is to celebrate these stories and to recommend the works of Ruskin Bond to any readers who are not thus far familiar with them.

The biography of Mr. Bond is readily available. Many of his stories are also wholly or partially autobiographical. He is not, therefore, a figure of mystery. His parents were English and lived and worked in British India. At an early age, however, they separated and his mother married an Indian gentleman and so Ruskin was raised with an Indian step-father. He is not of Anglo-Indian genetics, but he is certainly so by culture and by upbringing. This accounts for the charm of his stories. He is counted as an “Indian author of British descent” – he brings a distinctly English sensibility to a distinctly Indian experience. This is all to the good. The best things in modern India are always so. The present author, at least, has a self-confessed fondness for the synthetic fusion of things both British and Indian. Things Indian are usually much enhanced by contact with things British, and things British are certainly made more interesting by a touch of India. The British are stuffy, formal, cold. The Indians are raw, rowdy, alive. It is an unlikely coupling. That a people so reserved and utilitarian as the British should ever rule anywhere as ungovernable as India is one of the great ironies of history. Ruskin Bond is a very English writer, to be frank about it, but he is very English about India, and writes wonderful stories about the life, manners, customs and peculiarities of Hindoostani society as seen through his English eyes.

He might, perhaps, dispute this assessment, yet it is true. As one reads his stories one realizes that this is a man who – by the very circumstances of his life – cannot not be British. (How could he be anything else with a surname like Bond?) And thankfully he never attempts to be. He writes very honestly about himself and the world in which he grew up and has lived most of his years. A pervasive quality of his work is that he is a writer who is true to himself. He is very naturally both British and Indian. There is no ideological agenda, least of all a post-colonial one such as infects so much Indian fiction. He is writer who is very comfortable in his own skin, and who displays a great compassion for his characters. That is, for all their Britishness, his stories are throughly Indian as well. They are some of the best and most compelling evocations of Indian life – especially Indian boyhood - you will ever read. One can only think of someone like Rudyard Kipling as a storyteller after this pattern. Ruskin Bond stands in that company.

Where to start? Start with any of the collections of short stories. He won an award early in life for his novels, but he is essentially a short story writer – and this is very much in his favor as well. He may have written over five hundred tales, but they are short and sweet, lovely little gems. (The present author attended a bargain book sale in Enarkalum in Kerala of late and was confronted by the dozens and dozens of chunky spy-thriller novels by John Grisham, always popular with literate tourists. But, frankly, any man who writes that many long-winded novels and that many words and pages deserves to be beaten with a stick! The present writer confesses to having a long-held horror of superfluous novels and regrets living in an age beset by them. If a fiction writer has any real integrity he will recognize the short story as the essence of his art and the novel as a grotesque indulgence. Mr. Bond understands this.) Any collection of Mr. Bond’s stories – say, Potpourri, will do. Or The Best of... Or any of the themed collections. Stories and travel writings concerning the Ganges River – All Roads Lead to the Ganga, or stories concerning the Indian railways, or the jungle, or the mountains. He has been writing so long, Mr. Bond, that he has anthologized his own works according to a dozen different themes.

He is sometimes categorized as a children’s author. (Such is the fate of many short story writers. It seems that to be taken seriously as an adult writer one needs to write novels. Big books for big people.) Mr. Bond has certainly pioneered and developed the genre of children and young adult fiction in India, but the categorization is unfair if it is taken as a limitation. Readers of any age will find cause for delight in the stories of Ruskin Bond. (His books of light verse are fun as well.) Defying the label of ‘children’s writer’ is a novella entitled ‘The Sensualist’ – a study of nascent erotic obession, Mr. Bond’s most controversial work, but also one of his best. Few writers handle the erotic with as much insight and sensitivity as this. 

It was certainly a delight for the present writer to discover the works of this "Anglo-Indian" and to have them as a companion during the five and more months he has travelled from Calcutta, to the mountains, to the Ganges, to Delhi and southwards. There are, no doubt, many fine Indian writers about, but Ruskin Bond has been a steady contributor of excellent stories for many decades and surely stands as one of the great writers of modern India. Others - Salman Rushie, Arundhati Roy and co. - may be more the darlings of the Leftist literati and may tackle the supposed burning issues of our times in incendiary novels, but Ruskin Bond's unpretentious, understated tales have a directness and freshness that make him the better storyteller in the traditional sense. There is an innocent charm in the writings of Ruskin Bond not found in other contemporary Indian writers.

Readers of this blog might be aware that the present author - in another incarnation - is himself a dabbler in the short story – his own style and subject-matter is very different to that of Mr. Bond, but he nevertheless feels an affinity with him and admires him as a writer and aspires to be even remotely as lucid and prolific as he. It is a pity that he was not able to fulfill his ambition of visiting Mr. Bond in his aged solitude at Landour, near Mussoorie, amidst the hill stations north of Delhi, the familiar territory of some many of Mr. Bond’s stories. Hopefully, on some future journey. 

Yours

Harper McAlpine Black

The Lost City of Muziris

The Tabula Peutingeriana

The Romans, we know, traded for spices at sites along the western shores of the Hindoostani sub-continent, but the most famous trading centre of all, usually known as Muziris (or Muchiri), and mentioned in several Latin sources, including Pliny, and marked on the famous Roman map the Tabula Peutingeriana, is lost to us. Southern Indian sources speak of the Yavanas (Romans) and their “beautiful ships” that “stir the white foam on the Periyar River” coming to the “city where liquor abounds”, the “city that bestows wealth… to the merchants of the sea…” But where exactly was this illustrious city? It was, we can surmise, somewhere in the vicinity of present-day Cochin – the port city now at the mouth of the Periyar River - but its exact location in that area is unknown.

The problem arises because cyclonic floods of catastrophic proportions in the year 1341 completely reshaped the Malabar coastline. Muziris – or the city that succeeded it, by then called Cranganore – was drowned and the ancient port silted up. It is estimated that the coastline shifted several kilometers. A new opening of the Periyar into the Arabian Sea was opened and a backwater formed by the long stretch of the newly created Vypen Island. 

The complex waterways where the Periyar River meets the Arabian Sea was reshaped by the floods of 1341. Muziris was lost. Kochi (Cochin) became the principle port. 

It was after the events of 1341 that commerce shifted to Cochin which then became the centre for inter-civilizational trade for a series of early modern colonial powers: first the Portugese, then the Dutch and finally the British in turn. The history of Cochin is well documented, but anything prior to 1341 is sketchy at best. The great trading port known to the Romans, once the meeting place of east and west, is lost. 

It would be a great boon to discover it again, because it was there, in ancient times, that Rome met China, and also where the three great Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Mahometanism are supposed to have made their first entry into India. The Tabula Peutingeriana indicates that the Romans had built a Temple of Augustus there. Jewish legend says that Jews from the period of Solomon settled there, and then over 10,000 refugees from the destruction of the second Temple made their way there in the year 72AD founding synagogues along the Malabar coast. Christian sources relate that St. Thomas travelled there in the year 52AD, founding seven churches and bringing Thomasine Christianity to Southern India. Then, Muslim sources relate that the king of Muziris travelled to Mecca, met the Prophet Muhammad and converted to Islam and in this way Islam was first brought to India. Land routes came later. The sea route from the Red Sea or Persian Gulf to the Malabar Coast was of prime importance in the beginning. 

Thus was Muziris axial in the contacts between India and the West, as well as hosting a community of Chinese traders (famous for their distinctive fishing nets which still characterize the coastline in this region today) and thus being the midpoint between great civilisations. Muziris was one of the great hubs, the great junctions of human civilization. 

Without knowing the location of the city, and until excavations of the location have been made, however, much of the history of the western or Malabar coast is in question and subject to sometimes rancorous debate. Was there really a Temple to Augustus? When did the first Jews arrive? How early was Christianity established in Western India? Was there a trade of ideas between Europeans and the Chinese? 

A historical marker on the foreshore of Fort Kochi relating the great flood of 1341 explains that the Chinese fishing nets previously located at Crangancore.

The author is presently residing in Fort Kochi, on Cochin island, and has been spending his days visiting historical sites and pondering some of the historical problems related to this lost city. His interest is mainly in issues concerning the St. Thomas Christians and, even more, the Malabar Jews, and the peculiar religious traditions found in this famous region. It is, though, a very tangled matter. Local debates concerning the long lost ‘Muziris’ have caught his attention in the last few days, and they are rancorous indeed. As noted above, the very geography of the region has shifted considerably since ancient times, and there is now no agreement about how the area might once have looked. Debate rages. There are contending camps, and efforts to locate the lost city are hindered by the peculiar ferocity that characterizes Indian historical debates.

* * * 

The rancor was on full display just a few days ago. The President of the Indian Republic made a visit to the area and was due to visit the so-called 'Muziris Heritage Project', this being a set of archaeological diggings in the village of Pattanam. His visit caused an uproar, however. A group of historians rose up to denounce the 'Muziris Heritage Project' as fake and urged the President to stay away. This, at the eleventh hour, he did, and that decision was duly denounced as "painful" and "hurtful" and "perplexing" by a counter group of historians who have worked on the diggings at Pattanam for many years. What, the present author wondered, was all the fuss about? It is difficult to work out. The entire matter is hopelessly politicized in a thoroughly Indian way. In such a climate of disputation it is almost impossible to establish the truth. The matter, however, seems to have gone as follows:

*It is generally agreed, based on all records, that Muziris was in the vacinity of the medieval city known as Cranganore (known to the Jews as Shingli) and this is identified as the modern village of Kodungallur. 

*Diggings at Kodungallur, however, have been fruitless. No evidence of an ancient city on that site have been discovered. There are artifacts from the medieval period, but no earlier. So it happens that Muziris is not where we expected. 

*In the early 2000s another excavation was made at nearby Pattanam. This was done by the Kerala Council for Historical Research mainly consisting of amateur local historians. Diggings turned up some Roman coins and other artefacts along with a profusion of glass beads.

*The KCHR announced that Muziris had been found at Pattanam. Subsequently, the 'Muziris Heritage Project' was established and promoted to tourists. 

*But the identification of Pattanam with Muziris is premature. The fact that Roman coins etc. were found there is not in the least conclusive. Roman coins etc. have been found at many sites. It does not mean that Romans were at those sites, only that people at those sites traded with Romans, or traded with people who traded with Romans. 

*There are now contending groups of historical opinion. Some - mainly locals - proclaim Pattanam as the long lost city. Others - mainly outsiders - are sceptical or indeed denounce the Pattanam diggings as spurious. These critics believe that Pattanam was nothing more than a centre of glass bead-making and a marketplace. The 'Muziris Heritage Project', they say, is a tourist scam. 

*Nevertheless, the diggings at Pattanam are, at least, promising and perhaps indicate part of the ancient city. Much more exploration is needed. This, however, is hindered because the good people of Pattanam fear that their land is being taken from them and have resisted further archaeology. 

*It was into this tangle that the President wandered. At the last minute his advisors told him to back out, which he did. Thus the furore. History in modern India is like that. The experts agree on nothing. There are religious and ethnic sensitivities at every turn.  Parties are always eager for legitimacy. The slightest affront unleashes tirades of dispute. 

The present author has visited at least some of the areas of contention, but he is certainly in no position to make his own determination on such vexed matters. We know that Muziris was around here somewhere, but where? The land is low-lying, a maze of islands and backwaters. There are many layers of history, but the catastrophe of 1341 seems to have been decisive. History earlier than that is well and truly lost. Is Muziris at Pattanam? Unfortunately, it is just as possible that the original site of the great ancient city is currently somwhere at the bottom of the natural harbour of which Cochin now forms the gateway. 

Yours

Harper McAlpine Black

Roger Sworder the Platonist

Science & Religion in Archaic Greece

Amidst the madness and cacophony of late post-industrial modernity there are, hidden here and there, still a few quiet voices of perennial sanity. One of them is Roger Sworder the Platonist. Since retiring from a long and distinguished career as a University lecturer – known for his inspiring and compelling lectures – he has been especially productive, publishing numerous books of essays on Platonic and related themes. He stands among the company of a new breed of Platonic scholar who reject the dry, purely textual and theoretical approach to Plato and ancient wisdom traditions promoted in the Western academy over the last few centuries. Instead, like such scholars as Arthur Versluis, Pierre Hadot and Peter Kingsley – and following such maligned advocates as Thomas Taylor in former times - he sees the Greek heritage as a sapiental tradition, a spiritual tradition, that was and is central to Western civilization. 

In Dr. Sworder’s case he is a graduate of Oxford University, but he has few kind things to say about that august institution. He argues that the way the Greek philosophical tradition has been taught in such institutions of higher learning amounts, in fact, to a type of anti-philosophy, the very opposite to a tradition of spiritual wisdom. Indeed, he supposes that the strangulation and deformation of the ‘Classics’ in such institutions has been a deliberate device in the construction of the atheistic wasteland of Western modernity. In part, this is why he has spent his entire career teaching and writing in the remote backwaters of regional Australia. It was in a small, insignificant rural college that he was able to construct and teach a viable programme of studies outside of the strictures of the academic mainstream. This programme took the form of a degree course entitled ‘Studies in Western Traditions’ and then, later, in the wake of the endless amalgamations and restructurings to which Australian universities are prone, in a major programme entitled ‘Philosophy & Religious Studies’. His special expertise in all incarnations of those programmes was the Greeks – Plato, the Presocratics and Homer – and also the English Romantics. Away from the stuffy conventionalism of Oxford he was able to teach as he saw fit for over thirty years. Now he devotes his days to a semi-monastic contemplative existence writing and publishing.

A strident critic of corrosive technologies, he is happily internet-free, has never sat at a computer, composes his work in long-hand and indulges in neither email nor mobile phone. This is not just a stubborn Luddite posture, though; he has a genuine and deeply Platonic concern for the dehumanizing impact of technology, especially on meaningful human work. His deepest fear is that mankind is busily constructing what he calls a “toy store” of gadgets for itself without any notion of why or to what end. For many semesters his flagship subject was entitled ‘Philosophy of Work and Art’, delivered to students of both the Bachelor of Arts and the Bachelor of Fine Arts. Citing the teachings of the Republic – as also the Bhagavad Gita from the Hindoo Tradition – he sees meaningful work as the centerpiece of the human estate and the degradation of work as the most damning feature of industrial modernity. Further still, in the tradition of Thomas Taylor, he is a careful and precise critic of the methodical excesses of the modern sciences that underpin technology, the great shibboleth of our times. His disdain for the vulgarity of techno-modernity is legendary among his friends. A non-driver, he curses the age of the automobile. He has a Pythagorean devotion to fine music (he is married to the Chinese concert pianist, Nan Chien) and a corresponding hatred of noise. Nothing rouses his ire like the infernal racket of machines.

Mining, Metallurgy & the Meaning of Life

A deliberate anonymity is an important feature of Dr. Sworder’s entire manner. He lives in a remote corner of the world, communicates little, and writes his books without fanfare or efforts at self-promotion. He trusts that his work will reach those few who might profit from reading it. He does not indulge in the egoic antics of some and is wary of academic careerists. More to the point, he stays aloof from the New Age fads that occupy the borderlands of the ‘spirituality’ movement. He is neither a shaman nor a Sufi nor indeed an upper-case T ‘Traditionalist’. His writing is simple, clear, sparse and unadorned. He feels no need to show off his skills in Greek and Latin nor the great depth of his reading. His style is understated and modest but readers can be assured that it rests on the solid foundations of a lifetime’s earnest and dedicated study. He avoids verbosity. He is not out to match wits with self-important professors or to dazzle readers with his references. Nor is he building a personality cult. He is offering a sober, penetrating reading of Plato and the ancients relevant to our times and to the impasse in which we find ourselves based on hard-won observation. He receives little credit or acclaim, yet he is – without doubt – one of the foremost Platonists writing in English today. 

A Contrary History of the West & Other Essays

The cornerstone of Dr. Sworder’s ouvre is his work on the father of occidental ontology, Parmenides of Elea, and the relation of that thinker to Plato. He offers his own translation of the famous (fragmentary) poem of Parmenides and an interpretation of its symbolism and implicit cosmology. Although Parmenides is counted as the great metaphysician of the Western tradition, Sworder proposes that the proper way to approach his metaphysics is through cosmology. He reconstructs the parallelisms of this cosmology, seeing the goddess Aphrodite (and her star, the planet Venus) as central to the Parmenidean vision. It is Aphrodite (Venus) who is sentinel to the Palace of Night. Moreover, in a series of simple and elegant correspondences, Sworder shows how this reading of Parmenides demonstrates how the Delphic oracle worked in principle and how it offers a solution to Plato’s most intractable mathematical problem, the Nuptial Number. This was published in a private edition many years prior to the now best-selling venture of Peter Kingsley in The Dark Places of Wisdom and has been republished. For those who are wary of Kingsley’s neo-Shamanic and anti-Platonic primitivism – a journey into a pre-rational darkness - Roger Sworder offers a different account, one that unites Parmenides and Plato in the same tradition. 

Mathematical Plato

In the opening essay of his more recent book Mathematical Plato, he provides an altogether luminous reading of Plato’s most troublesome dialogue, called the Parmenides, in which he offers a simple way to resolve apparent difficulties – from a Parmenidean point of view – arising out of Socrates’ pet theory, the Theory of Forms. Sworder sees Plato as using the monism of Parmenides to resolve the apparent dualities of that Theory and in the process offer a vision of an ‘optimal’ world, the best of all possible worlds. Sworder’s Platonism, that is to say, is not in any sense world-denying.

It is worth quoting the final paragraphs of that essay, since they provide a capsule statement of Sworderean Platonism:

Plato’s theory of ideas expresses that view of the world around us where everything is very beautiful. The myths of the Phaedo and Republic, Phaedrus and Statesman spring from this same visionary power. This is the world of Parmenides’ chariot ride to the palace of a Goddess who reveals all things to him; the world of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Divine and mortal freely mix. Everything is well made and performs at the limit of its potential; our everyday activities are archetypal. It is perhaps a greater injustice than Socrates suffered that Plato should ever be considered a Utopian idealist who despised the world.

Fully to understand how this world is the most perfect possible realization of the fullest totality of the most exquisite ideas is a Her- culean education. The deepest seclusion is needed to complete a thorough study of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music and dia- lectic. After these come their applications to the natural sciences. These studies are typically pursued through early adulthood to middle age. That done, the meaning of our human life emerges as a vision in which no further parting is possible between the absolute and the relative, the eternal and the temporal. There is apocatastasis. This is the goal of Plato’s theory.

The present writer must confess to being a student of Dr. Sworder and to regarding him as a mentor. 

The works of Roger Sworder are available through Sophia Perennis Press. 

The Romantic Attack on Modern Science in England & America

* * * 

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black